It’s my first morning at the conference, and right now the director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Coal & Power Import & Export is waxing poetic about how are planet is uniquely “blessed” in the solar system to support life. She goes on using flowery language to describe “clean energy systems” that protect our “beautiful blue planet” while supporting our needs for “many generations to come”. She urges us to be “as proactive as we can be” in “bring[ing] clean energy technologies to the world”. Gag me. DOE speakers are always full of feel-good optimism while their agency takes no action and doesn’t even talk about potential action on carbon emissions. Okay, there’s a serious speaker up now and I should pay attention.

[photopress:carnival.jpg,thumb,floatleft][photopress:sheepdogging.jpg,thumb,floatright] A few tidbits before I left town. There was some sort of festival going on there, which included the little carnival section, where they were playing a dance remix of Beverly Hills Cop theme “Axel F” when I walked by. There was also what I interpreted as a sheep-dog competition. The man would whistle various patterns and the dog would jump up and chase the five sheep this way or that. It was sort of impressive.

[photopress:wood_church.jpg,thumb,floatleft] [photopress:storeroom.jpg,thumb,floatright]The other thing I have to say is that they love their wood architecture here, especially rough-hewn log construction. This church is one of the biggest and oldest in Norway, dating to the 1200’s, which is pretty old for a wooden structure. The other structure is a large store-room, similarly aged. [photopress:log_bridge.jpg,thumb,floatright] Also, I love that this is a classic king-truss bridge, except made out of logs. Interiors, also, are dominated by unstained wood paneling, wood floors, and hulking wood furniture. You can start to see the roots of the Ikea aesthetic.

I feel kind of ill today, which is an especially lousy feeling to have when traveling. I was going to do a second hike today but I don’t think I’m up to it. Now the question it what I will do for the next 7 hours before the bus comes in a tiny town with, soon, no hotel room in which to set up my laptop.

I was just thinking about yesterday’s hike and musing that, although I have previously disparaged hiking alone, it has some distinct advantages (which, to some extent, apply to traveling alone in general): you can get grumpy and no one is around to notice or be affected; you can get lost and backtrack a lot (which I did for about the first hour yesterday trying to find the trailhead) without anyone getting mad or negatively assessing your sense of direction; you can eat questionable things like peanut butter and jelly tortillas and tuna from the can without being judged, and you can sing along loudly to the songs in your head, pausing and rewinding to correct the wrong notes, without disturbing anyone’s peace and quiet.

It turns out these earphone-earplugs I got for the trip are really great. On the plane they block out an impressive amount of engine rumble — enough so that music is coherent at pretty low volume. I mean, I can hear all the instruments and frequencies without straining, and I’ve never been able to do that before on an airplane, even with isolating headphones. On the bus they essentially eliminated background noise; I might as well have been listening on my home stereo. They are surprisingly comfortable too, much more so than my regular earplugs. The sound quality is very good with all of the frequencies clear, except the sound is a slight bit flat (cold?) — like music played through a subwoofer-satellite system. But overall, I’m enjoying the new gadget.

On a loosely-related note, I talked to a middle-aged Norwegian man last night who also plays drums and keyboard. His English was about is good as my Spanish, which is to say, pretty limited, but I gleaned that his hero is Johnny Cash(!) and he’s been to Nashville twice, once actually meeting the Man in Black. He was baffled that I didn’t know Alan Jackson, his second favorite musician (apparently he is a popular country musician with many hits in the 90’s).

I couldn’t make it in to Jutenheimen national park as I planned because the bus doesn’t start running there until next week. I’m stuck here in Lom, about 20 miles from the park with no bikes or cars to rent. I flirted with hitchhiking, but didn’t want to risk getting stranded. My fanciful plan to find other guests at breakfast who were going hiking was thwarted when there was absolutely no one else around when I came down this morning. So a took a trail near town. It turned out to be a long, very steep hike with great views down into three river valleys. I didn’t see another person the whole time except for a search-and-rescue (?) helicopter that kept flying by. It was good, but I may have overexerted.

[photopress:river_valley_with_brush.jpg,thumb,pp_empty][photopress:sheep_over_river_valley.jpg,thumb,pp_empty][photopress:lom_from_above.jpg,thumb,pp_empty][photopress:colorful_ground.jpg,thumb,pp_empty][photopress:terrain_with_peaks.jpg,thumb,pp_empty]

It’s not a great photo, but here’s the best I could get of fjords so far.
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I’m pretty much ecstatic to be on the Internet right now, and fairly surprised that this hotel/hostel in a small mountain town has free wireless. It turns out that my voltage converted doesn’t fit in most Norwegian plugs, and my devices were dying off one by one as they ran out of batteries and I couldn’t recharge them. My mp3 player went last night and I was pretty sad about that today when for some reason I had a bunch of songs going through my head and an intense desire to listen to them.

There are definitely no adapters to be found in this little town, so I got proactive. I remembered reading in wikipedia that the voltage that some European countries use the same voltage standard but have a recessed housing, which is what they look like here. [photopress:adapter_assembly.jpg,thumb,floatleft] So I just need a way to connect the pins in the wall to the the pins in the adapter. I have no tools because of the fricking airplane rules, so I picked up a cheap steak knife from the supermarket. The lynch-pin was the extension cord I found at the convenience store. I cut off the female end and stripped it with the knife. But the color conventions of the wires are different. I seemed to remember from wikipedia that green is ground, (or “earth” — nice mnemonic), but to be sure — I’m a little proud of this — I touched the pins to my camera battery and shorted the blue and brown wires to look for a spark and see which wires were hot (I was right). I attached the bare wires to the adapter pins with bandage tape I had in my bag. The last thing was to try it out on my least valuable device. I decided that was my cell phone. I tried it and … not even a spark. It works fine. I charged up my music player a bit and listened to a few songs I was craving. Then I attached the cord to my laptop and here I am. It’s not a what I’d call a “robust” solution, but it works for now.

I’ve been into Last.fm lately. It’s great to see what my friends are listening to in almost-real-time, and the radio “stations” that you can select by tag or that play your recommended music are pretty fun. Everyone should check it out. I added a recent track list to this page over on the right, so if I’ve been listening to music on one of my computers lately you can see what I’ve been listening to. Unfortunately it doesn’t fit so well. Someday I’ll work on that.

I’ve been hearing about this personal greenhouse gas emissions offsetting lately. Basically, the idea is that, while you may be concerned about climate change, it’s hard to stop emitting CO₂ and thereby contributing to it: you’ve got to drive, heat your home, buy products that were transported in trucks, and so forth. But you can reduce or eliminate your personal contribution to climate climate change by paying to offset your emissions, that is, stop the same quantity of greenhouse gases from being emitted somewhere else. Salon has a thoughtful article on the phenomenon, and the author identifies a half-dozen companies who will sell you emissions offsets, noting that the price varies from $5.50 to $30 per ton of CO₂¹. That’s pretty cheap, compared to what most people expect the industrial price of carbon emissions will be in the long term. Incidentally, I do research on technology the we estimate will offset emissions for something in the neighborhood of $140/ton-CO₂.

So I’ve been thinking, why not join the some tens of thousands of offsetters and atone for my own emissions? There are a few interesting caveats to personal emissions offsetting, but I at least want to see how much I would need to purchase. Most of the company websites have calculators to help you estimate what your emissions are. You put in things like how much you drive and the mileage of your car, how high is your utility bill and in which state you live. Of the few that I tried, all were missing something big. One neglected air travel, one neglected home heating, and none accounted for the embodied emissions of consumer goods. Many of the companies focus just on car emissions or car + plane emissions. I guess the rationale here is that people feel guilty about driving and flying because it is something they have control over, on the margin, and so they are particularly willing to pay to relieve that guilt.

My emissions came out as little as a tenth of the average, largely because I don’t drive (I put in some miles for the rides I bum) and share an apartment. But I don’t think that is really capturing everything, so I’m going to try my own calculation. Here goes.

Driving

This is a wild guess for how much driving I’m responsible for. Most of it is probably when I’m home on break. I’m assuming that when there are multiple people in the car, the emissions get divided evenly by the number of passengers.

[tex]\left( \frac{500 \,miles}{year} \right) \left( \frac{gallon \, gas}{22\, miles} \right) \left( \frac{.011 \, ton \, CO_2}{gallon \, gas} \right) = 0.25 \frac{ton\, CO_2}{year}[/tex]

Flying

Here’s the category I’m probably highest on compared with other Americans. I routinely fly across the country to visit family, and lately I’ve been flying similarly far for research trips to Canada and to conferences. Airplanes have about the same emissions per passenger-mile as cars, coincidentally — equivalent to about 34 miles/gallon driving alone. I figured two trips home and two conference trips to get the miles per year. Sources: Energy Information Agency here and here.

[tex]\left( \frac{17000 \,miles}{year} \right) \left( \frac{3600 \, Btu}{passenger \cdot mile} \right) \left( \frac{7.64 \times 10^{-8} \, ton \, CO_2}{Btu \, jet \, fuel} \right) = 4.7 \frac{ton\, CO_2}{year}[/tex]

Heating

I’m making a rough estimate at the per-person gas bill since I don’t have all the month’s prices.

[tex]\left( \frac{\$600}{year} \right) \left( \frac{1000 cubic feet \, }{\$16.82} \right) \left( \frac{million \, Btu}{1160 \, cubic\, feet} \right) \left( \frac{0.015 \, ton \, CO_2}{million \, Btu} \right)= 0.45 \frac{ton\, CO_2}{year}[/tex]

Electricity

This is a straightforward calculation using the Pennsylvania electricity price and emissions factor. Pennsylvania electricity is really dirty.

[tex]\left( \frac{\$120}{year} \right) \left( \frac{kW \cdot hr}{\$0.098} \right) \left( \frac{5.74 \times 10^{-4} \, ton \, CO_2}{kW \cdot hr} \right) = 0.70 \frac{ton\, CO_2}{year}[/tex]

Food

I’m drawing my calculation from the article I discussed earlier about diet and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a little tough because the authors do everything in terms of differences between diets, not absolute emissions. I think I’m in the neighborhood of 1 ton/year, compared with the average American diet which is about 2.3 tons/yr. Then again I regularly eat produce trucked from California, so it could be higher.

Consumer goods

I don’t have the patience to do them all, so I’m trying to think of the few most important categories of consumer goods I buy. I’m using the Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Analysis website to get emissions factors for various categories of goods. I’m making rough guesses at the dollar values, too.

Computers and parts, sort of amortizing the equipment I already have:
[tex]\left( \frac{\$500}{year} \right) \left( \frac{5.0 \times 10^{-4} ton \, CO_2}{\$\, purchased} \right) = 0.25 \frac{ton\, CO_2}{year}[/tex]

Audio/visual equipment:
[tex]\left( \frac{\$100}{year} \right) \left( \frac{6.5 \times 10^{-4} ton \, CO_2}{\$\, purchased} \right) = 0.07 \frac{ton\, CO_2}{year}[/tex]

Furniture (I don’t really buy furniture, but I’m trying to account for my roommates’ Ikea stuff that I use):
[tex]\left( \frac{\$100}{year} \right) \left( \frac{8.7 \times 10^{-4} ton \, CO_2}{\$\, purchased} \right) = 0.09 \frac{ton\, CO_2}{year}[/tex]

Conclusion

If I add that all up, I get about 7.5 tons CO₂ per year. I clearly left stuff out. I didn’t account for energy use or anything else happening at school, and it’s not clear whether I should. Other than that, I think I got all the big factors. But it’s a messy calculation, anyway, so let’s say 10 tons roughly accounts for my climate impact. I could offset that for $300/yr, which, in the scheme of things is not bad. $300 to completely solve the climate problem? I could do that. Of course it wouldn’t be that simple for everyone to go carbon-neutral because the economy would have to dramatically change, but it wouldn’t necessarily be more costly in the economic sense.

P.S.: It’s nice to finally use the LaTeX plugin for my blog to write equations here. Heheh.

1. For a sense of scale, United States CO₂ emissions are about 25 tons per person per year. [↩]

My sister Shaunah turned me on to this comic strip, Questionable Content. It combines indie and robot humor with aimless 20-something drama. It’s great. Read the archives from the beginning, but be warned, the pages flow into each other sequentially so it’s easy to just keep reading them indefinitely.

Yesterday Shaz (fortunately) dragged me out to go photographing amid the budding Spring and the beautiful weather. Here are the best of the shots I got. Thanks, Shaz.

[photopress:grass.jpg,thumb,pp_empty][photopress:bridge_trusses.jpg,thumb,pp_empty][photopress:apartment_buildings_and_intersecting_lines.jpg,thumb,pp_empty]

Like misery, bad habits love company. Conversely, being the only one in the household to drink coffee makes it much less fun, especially when other members of the household can’t stand the smell of it. While home for break, I’ve tried to limit my coffee consumption to mornings when I need that bit of liquid motivation to get some schoolwork done. By now, the tail end of break, I’m a caffein lightweight, so after two half-cups of coffee I’m positively buzzing. Hence I am doing crazy things like adding Friendster friends and writing blog posts.

One nice thing about “working” here in my former bedroom is the really nice view of a courtyard outside my window. It’s not a view I had growing up (my parents’ house has been steadily stepping up in classiness since I left for college), but I enjoy it. It’s nice at night as well, when Christmas lights give it a liminal glow and reflect off the dewy surfaces.

This being my last post before packing up and heading back east, I might as well put up some other photos from my stay.

[photopress:waves_and_surfer_at_The_Point.jpg,thumb,alignright][photopress:onlookers_at_The_Point_2.jpg,thumb,alignright][photopress:s_house.jpg,thumb,alignright]

To a conscientious person, the holiday season brings concerns for respect of multiple cultures and religious beliefs. With the seasonal bustle and American obsession with time-efficiency, we produce phrases such as “Happy Christmukah” and “Merry Christmakwanzukuh” (I am still waiting for an elegant inclusion of our Pagan friends in a compound holiday).

To right-wing pundits, however, the holiday season is a time to propagate the perennial myth of the “war on Christmas”. In a disturbing twist, some of these pundits support their indignance with the claim that America is a “Christian nation”, a claim made by these extremists in other contexts as well. They assert that America was founded on Christian principles and that the founding fathers meant for Christianity to have a central or elevated status in the government.

This is, of course, absolutely wrong. Even my lousy grade school history unit conveyed that this country was founded on Enlightenment principles more than any others. It is well-documented that the core Founding Fathers were deists, not theists. Just to remind myself, though, I thought I would take a look at the roots of “separation of church and state” to see how tenuous is this privilege.

I have to admit, I’m not generally a history fan, and I hadn’t read much of the Bill of Rights since middle school. And I’m not given to emotional reactions to, well, most things, but especially government documents. So I was quite surprised at my visceral sense of awe and gratitude when I reviewed the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There is such beautiful simplicity in this statement, so powerful as to grant unparalleled freedom to our civilization for more than two centuries. The principle of a secular government is not tenuous at all, but stated very clearly, right there in the Constitution! Obvious, I know, but apparently not obvious enough to many in our society.

Of course we rely not just on the letter of the constitution, but on the judicial interpretation of it. And thankfully that interpretation has been just as clear; as Justice David Souter wrote, “government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion.” (Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 1994).

I apologize for making an old and obvious point, but I feel personally moved to share it, and to say God bless our secular government.

Read more:

• How the Secular Humanist Grinch Didn’t Steal Christmas [Salon.com]
• Debating America’s Christian Character [NPR]
• First Amendment to the United States Constitution [Wikipedia]

My family and some of our friends have a tradition of spending a week each August with my grandparents in the desert east of the Sierras, in Lone Pine, CA. Here are some photos from our stay. Incidentally, we had a biggest-in-fifteen-years summer storm early in the week which even wetted the desert with an amazing day-long drizzle. A few of these pictures benefit from that rarity.

I had a good time photo-geeking out with my friend Jim, a far more experienced photographer than I, who snapped this gem while the ground was still wet and the lighting was just right to bring out the color of the land. I also, as it turns out, feel well-recreated after some time in the desert and mountains and away from the Internet(!).